Love is always being given where it is not required.

He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.